NewsForge Reviews Excel Clone for Linux

martin-k writes "NewsForge has a glowing review about PlanMaker for Linux, a new spreadsheet for Linux that is much more compatible with Microsoft Excel than the competition and speedier, too. PlanMaker has Excel-compatible charting and AutoShapes and reads and writes any Excel file you throw at it. Here is a chart comparing Excel, OpenOffice.org, and PlanMaker." Yes, Virginia, NewsForge is also part of OSDN, like Slashdot.

Comments

Let me be the first

[Apreche]

Let me be the first to say what everyone else is gearing up to say.

gnumeric exists. Acknowledge both its existence and superiority in the world of spreadsheets.

They left out Gnumeric

[Travis Fisher]

One of the best spreadsheets for linux, gnumeric has support for 100% of Excel's functions as well as most of its other features. Its one of the highest quality and most stable pieces of software I've ever seen for linux. Its amazing they overlooked this as competition.

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[Anonymous Coward]

As the vast bulk of the excel spreadsheets I deal with are embedded in word documents, the "bundling" in Open Office is far more important to me than anything else, and Open Office's excel compatibility is already "good enough" for most people.

This is what FreeDesktop.org people need to realise: The single MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do is agree on a standard Linux component embedding (OLE/COM) technology, and then maybe one day people _will_ have the choice of using gnumeric instead of OOo Calc to read excel data embedded in word documents being edited in OOo Writer. But
it DOESN'T WORK YET.

Microsoft just dictates their OLE in their normal stalinist style, but we can't. So we need to have a lively technical debate, and then broad agreement on a baseline set. I recommend specifying protocol, not binary API, in the normal X fashion, but make it good!

Re:They left out Gnumeric

[tashanna]

As much as I applaud Gnumeric for their great implementation, it's still a Linux/Unix only implementation. PlanMaker and OO are both cross-platform for those who can't ditch Windows. If a user can't leave Windows behind, that places Gnumeric out of the running.

More sense

[barcodez]

Wouldn't it make more sense to work with OO.o not against them?

Re:More sense

[Sique]

In this case the question is simply wrong. SoftMaker is around longer than most software companies. I remember the first SoftMaker adverts in a PC magazine in 1987, where they announced their TextMaker for 149,- DM (Deutschmark), which was a 5th of the usual price for a text processing software at the time. Germany had always several small office productivity companies, and one of them brought us on the road to OpenOffice (StarDivision, now bought by SUN), and SoftMaker is also still alive and kicking, working from the beginning with a "sell cheap, sell enough" model for their software.

They survived all the storms of time by getting large contracts with public administrations like towns and counties. And there they probably got most of their bugreports from, because a town administration can be sure to get lots of quite strange documents, in content and in form.

Non-Free

[4im]

Whatever it's qualities may be, this PlanMaker thingie is non-free (as in speech and as in beer). This makes it very much uninteresting for quite some people. If there's a decent alternative that's free (hint: there are, several), then that's the way to go IMHO.

Re:Interesting....

[Tarantolato]

This has nothing to do with the open source community. It's a proprietary app that happens to run on Linux. Also, OpenOffice spreadsheet already weakened userbase of Gnumeric, which was and is a better and more compatible app. I don't see you whining about that.

Shameless.

[Raven42rac]

This is utterly shameless. You can save things in compatibilty mode in excel, so that they can be read by previous versions of the software, most users know this already. How the hell is it OOO's fault if the file is password protected? The chart is from the company that makes the software, not a unbiased third party, I could craft a document that would work better in one program or the other, I have not seem OOO stoop to that level. And another thing, Planmaker costs money $50 USD or Euro. This is an advertisement masked as an article.

Non-Free, Why not just use Excel?

[dilute]

If you don't have to be absolutely compatible, there are plenty of free (really free) spreadsheets. Gnumeric, being considerably more lightweight that Openoffice, does the trick for me most of the time.

When nothing other than Excel will do, why not just run Citrix (or some virtual box if you don't have access to a Citrix server) and run real Excel?

If you seriously need Excel, I doubt this will be a satisfactory long-term solution, for any number of reasons. Plus, it ain't free.

In sum, who needs another me-too piece of proprietary software?

Re:Macros rear their ugly head again.

[arkhan_jg]

I'm sorry, but if these data handling functions are business critical, then you need a proper database (sql, basically) combined with proper data in/out.

The number of cases of huge excel/macro combinations dieing messily, or corrupting the data is legion. I'm no database specialist (network admin myself), but the guy I work with who is, has several stories of companies that regretted relying on access or excel/vb for critical data processing, and one of them nearly went under when they found one of their (many) linked spreadsheets had been corrupted and had been feeding bad data into their conclusions for months.

Seriously, PLEASE don't rely on a cheap and cheerful desktop products (which is what ms office and openoffice are) to manage your company dataflow. Get a proper system on the backend. Use excel to munge a bit on the front end, do the graphs etc, fine - but put your data-storage and processing into a proper database system. It'll cost you more, but it just ain't worth the risk.

It works well for me

[Guenhwyvar]

I have some xls files that contain a several graphs that are generated from thousands of data points.

• Open Office takes 10 minutes or more to open them.
• Gnumeric opens them quickly but doesn't draw the graphs correctly.
• KSpread doesn't draw the graphs.

However, I just tried the trial version of PlanMaker for LInux and it had no trouble displaying the graphs exactly as they should and was able to open even the largest file in just a few seconds.

Horay for a viable alternative, even if it is not open source.